EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT...

Many newcomers  to Maine bring with them the tribal garb of their former lives.  One mud season later, things usually sort out, and Prada moves to the back of the closet.  Therefore, as a public service The Downeast Dilettante presents these quick guides, first in a series.

 Everything You Need to Know About Shopping in Down East Maine:

1. Marden's Surplus & Salvage
2. Reny's Department Store
3. L.L. Bean Factory Outlet

Everything You Need to Know About Fashion in Down East Maine

1. Marden's Surplus & Salvage
2. Reny's Department Store
3. L.L. Bean Factory Outlet

Everything Else You Need to Know About Fashion in Down East Maine

1. Polar Fleece
2. Polar Fleece
3. Polar Fleece

Everything You Need to Know About the Official State Symbols

1. State Tree---Eastern White Pine
2. State  Bird---Black Cap Chickadee
3. State Fabric----Polar Fleece. 

 Fun Facts

1. Not all  merchandise at Reny's  is inscribed 'Souvenir of Maine'.  Some is inscribed 'Woolrich'.
2. Contrary to rumor, L.L. Bean does not manufacture swim suits in polar fleece.  The spruce green polar fleece bikini is urban myth.
3. I  have a friend who plays tennis in polar fleece.  Yes, in summer.

Any questions?  In our next installment of "Everything You Need to Know":  Dining in Down East Maine.

SAFE PASSAGE

Last Monday was a beautiful day, unseasonably warm and springlike, and my father got in his pickup and drove himself over to the county seat for a haircut, an outing that he immensely enjoyed.   This Monday was a little colder, but the sky was even bluer, and less than 100 feet from the spot where he was born, overlooking the harbor he loved so much, he left on another, longer, journey.

Safe travels, Dad. 

 

Gordon Emerson

September 18, 1926 - February 20, 2012

GINGERBREAD VILLAGE

One rubs one's eyes in astonishment when one first sees it---a tiny settlement of even tinier Victorian cottages in the woods on a bluff,  arranged around a village green sloping down to Penobscot Bay. It is crowded, cheerful, festive, even a bit unruly in spots.  In the summer, with porches bursting with flowering plants and wicker rockers, sailboats in the bay and softball games on the green, it is like a stage set ideal of summer life 100 years ago.

One doesn't come upon it easily.  It is hidden off tourist Rte.1 midway between the groomed nautical splendors of Camden and the artsy hipness of Belfast, both harbor towns of stately white houses and upscale restaurants and galleries.  It is Bayside in Northport, founded in 1849 as a Methodist campground retreat.  Originally the faithful would pitch tents for their revivals; by 1869, the first cottage was built.  A hotel, the Wesleyan Grove House,  followed in 1875, and by 1879, about 40 of the eventual 300 cottages had been built. In the day  steamboats were the chief mode of transport up and down the coast, and it was a favorite day trip.  Today, there are no stores, and in summer, the loudest sound is likely to be the slamming of an old fashioned wooden screen door.  Nearby, on Temple Heights, a spiritualist camp still survives, with mediums available in summer.  

An early 20th century view, top, of cottages, and the hotel, below.

Passing by last week, I swung off the highway for a quick visual treat.  The sky was glowering, and the late afternoon light was not conducive to photography.  I walked around for a few minutes, but found I wasn't dressed for the sharp cold wind off Penobscot Bay (we've been enjoying a mild, mostly above freezing, winter, and I've gotten a bit casual about dressing warmly), and the metal camera even too cold in my hands.  It's just as well though, for had I taken pictures in the summer,  you'd all be calling your real estate agents.  One can imagine worse fates than a few summer weeks spent in one of these lacy dollhouses overlooking the sea.

Park Row, sloping down to the bay

I love the way the roof was raised on the cottage on the left

The tiniest of all

A gravity defying dormer.  And yes, the name of the cottage is 'Braking Wind'

As in practically every seaside town in Maine, real estate offices prevail over retail commerce in former storefronts

The same row 100 years apart.  The blue house, above, is on the left in the picture below.  The house between it and the yellow house has disappeared, one of only a very few not to survive.

The community hall, with yacht club offices in the basement

One is reminded of the colorful little houses of Key West.  Or would, if Key West had hills.  And snow. And no bars.  And spruce trees instead of Palms.  And no Drag Queens.  Other than that...

Almost perfect pitch.  I think this cottage was used in Mel Gibson's 'Man Without A Face, filmed here and at the former Frederic Law Olmsted's summer place on Deer Isle (props purchased from the Dilettante's shop also make appearances).  It is no wonder movies cost so much to make.  In the movie, this house belonged to a young boy who visits Gibson at his house (Felsted).  In the movie the boy merely bicycles over.  In reality, the two houses are fifty miles apart by road, or 20 by water.  $$$.

MRS. WHARTON GOES CANOEING IN NYSD

I forget things.  It's not age.  I've always been this way.   While my head is in the clouds, pondering such things the influence of 16th century urban planning in Italy on modern strip malls in New England and vice versa, I sometimes don't remember that I was actually supposed to call the plumber.  Last week was no exception.  I forgot to lunch with a delightful friend, and I forgot to send a piece I had written to coincide with Edith Wharton's birthday to New York Social Diary.  Fortunately, DPC is a most generous and forgiving host, and has published my belated birthday card today.  That piece can be read by clicking HERE.

Edith Wharton strolled here:  The Shore Path at Bar Harbor, near the cottage of her brother Frederic Newbold Jones.

As to the delightful friend who was stood up, she too claims to have forgiven me, but has extracted her revenge by putting me up for auction for benefit of her local library. At the moment, with 11 days to go, the bidding is at $83.00.   (I should have sent flowers)

SIX MONTHS AND 100 DEGREES AGO

I awoke at 6:15 this morning.  The sun was rising, the sky a clear brilliant blue, the  temperature minus three--yes minus three--- degrees Fahrenheit.  Now, two hours later, it is a balmy minus one.  According to the online weather report, the windchill is -21).  Welcome to little Antarctica.  Is it possible that only six months have passed since the hottest day of last year, and now it is 100 degrees colder?

On that day, with temperatures flirting with the 100 degree mark along the Maine coast, , not a cool breeze to be found.  At the hottest part of the day, I was driving North on I-495 through Massachusetts, heading back to Maine.  At five P.M., after I exited onto 95 to Maine, the New Hampshire toll booths ahead looked like the Gates of Hell, summer traffic, rush hour traffic, and people heading to and from the beach traffic, all backed up on the steaming black pavement.

The Emerson house in York village, dating to the early 18th century, site of the Decorator's show house,.

Fifteen miles further up 95, edging toward the Maine toll booth, I cracked, and veered off highway at the York exit and headed  for the ocean.  In York Village, a lovely history proud town founded a few seconds after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, I was momentarily distracted by the Olde York Decorator's show house, held an 18th century house in York Village.  Ever mindful of my readership, I intended to take photographs for the blog, but was firmly (but pleasantly) told that I might not do so.  As with most decorator show houses, the mix was evenly balanced between very good and very bad.  Most compelling to me was not the decor, but an 18th century painted floor treatment that had survived through 200 years of family ownership.

In the neighboring village of York Harbor, which split off from York proper when it became popular as a fashionable summer colony in the late 19th century, I left the air-conditioned discomfort of the car to stroll along the water.  What confronted me was not the expected cooling of the late afternoon ocean breeze, but rather a wall of heat, apparently blowing straight in from Morocco.

The village of York Harbor is anchored by a large colonial revival building, housing a theatre on the second floor above former storefronts.  Built in 1895, it is attributed to architect William H. Dabney, whose also designed 'Redcote', a charming small shingle cottage built in 1882.

I had not wandered around York Harbor for years.   Though much has changed in the world, the prevailing tone, architecturally and socially, is still English and aristocratic.  The architecture is a handsome mix of crisp early New England, and shingle and colonial revival styles from the resort days.  The big surprise was that the shops, of the usual sort that service summer colonies---tweeds and tearooms, linens and fancy groceries--- had almost completely disappeared, with only a few offices occupying former commercial spaces.

 At 7:30 PM, the light was still strong, the temperatures still in the mid-90's, and the beach was as busy as it were 2:30 in the afternoon

Beaches are rare in Maine, rocky ledges not so much.  The little beach in York Harbor is bracketed on one side by Stage Neck, looking for all the world like a luminist painting by Kensett in the early evening heat.

York Harbor, as painted by Martin Johnson Heade in 1877

As at Newport, a public cliff walk  separates  grand old summer cottages from their ocean frontage.

The principal club, The Reading Room, is in an English picturesque style building, designed by James Purdon in 1905, splendidly located on the cliffs overlooking the harbor.

As at Newport, a public cliff walk  separates  summer cottages from their ocean frontage.  Beyond the reading room, this buttressed wall with its corner turret supports the terraces of the house.above

Do not be deceived by these photographs.  The breeze that evening was not the cool salt tinged ocean breeze one expects, but rather a solid wall of heat from North Africa

The rambling white house is Milbury Meadow, designed by John Russell Pope in a non-classical mood for Harold C. Richard in 1926.  According to John Harris in Moving Rooms, the house contained a 17th century oak paneled drawing room imported from England, since destroyed when fire gutted the interior.

A classic, and almost archetypal Maine cottage, this superb example has escaped the insensitive modernization and 'upgrade' fever that has infected so many.

The very English Episcopal chapel was designed in 1906 by Henry J. Hardenburgh, best known as the architect of the Plaza Hotel.  A bench in its lovely sunken garden invites contemplation---of the portapotty at the opposite side of the garden.

For another view of York Harbor, I recommend this post from one of my favorite blogs, Streets of Salem.

HISTORIC INTERIORS: A Country House Near Boston

Blogging is very self-indulgent.  One gets to think out loud about one's interests, and share the musings with interested readers---who, with their comments, give the blogger new insight into old passions.

I've been thinking a great deal this year about the graceful old Federal houses of New England---those first flowerings of design from our young country, that so well reflect the ideals, political and social, of the founders, and that for so long defined the look of most New England towns.  In particular, I determined to write about a group of country houses, those with the newly fashionable oval rooms in particular, built around Boston between 1790 and 1820.   I don't flatter myself that I have new insight to add to the impressive body of scholarship published about these houses over the last hundred years, but hope that you enjoy my light summaries.

What brings me back to the subject of oval rooms today is a group of late 19th century photographs passed on by a friend---but more about those in a moment...

McIntyre's drawing for the entrance front of the Vale, which looks backwards to the Palladian tradition of Somerset House, more than to the newly fashionable neo-classicism that characterized the Federal style (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

McIntyre's drawing of the first floor plan (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952

'The Vale', in Waltham, Massachusetts was designed in the 1790's by the great carver-architect of Salem, Samuel McIntyre, for merchant prince Theodore Lyman.   Lyman began development of his estate in 1793, laying out a park and garden in the informal English style of Capability Brown, with a stream dammed to form an ornamental lake, and glasshouses against a brick wall, in which Camellias and other exotics were grown.

The entrance front in the mid-19th century, showing McIntyre's completed design.  The Greek Revival entrance portico is an early 19th century addition

The house designed by McIntyre, completed in 1798, was based on designs in English builder's pattern books, but executed in wood, the plentiful building material of New England, rather than the stone of Old England.  With his typical mastery, McIntyre translated details like quoins and pilasters, meant to be stone, to wood with high effect, yet the scale (the main block was only fifty feet wide), unlike its English prototypes, was domestic, not palatial.  

The Ballroom as it appeared in the early 20th century.

The composition was Palladian, with a separate kitchen wing connected by a hypen, balanced a few years later by a ballroom wing.   The center hall led directly to an oval room centered on the garden front facing the glasshouses, referred to by the family as the 'Bow Parlor'. 

The Bow Parlor, as it appears today.  The white painted Hepplewhite chairs are part of the original Lyman furnishings

Lyman lived in great style in his new house.  After his death, it passed to his son, and in turn his grandson, Arthur Lyman, treasurer of the Lowell textile mills.   What had been one of the grand houses of the area at the beginning of the century was by now dated and old fashioned, and not suited to the more expansive scale of living made possible by industrial age wealth.  Fond of the old house, Arthur Lyman hired the local firm of Hartwell & Richardson (no relation to H.H. Richardson, about whom more in a minute) to enlarge and remodel the family homestead in 1882.

First floor plan as it appeared before 1883 renovations. Note the long curved interior walk to a privy at top right, forming one side of kitchen courtyard, and at a further extreme, a two-holer in the shed at the upper corner.  An indoor water-closet may be seen left of the bow parlor . (Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

The new plan, with modern interior plumbing, but the outside privy still survives. The staircase has moved to left of Bow Parlor

Their first design was for a complete transformation of the house, and was not executed.  Evidence is strong that Arthur Lyman had second thoughts about how drastically he wished to alter the old family homestead, and the final design, completed in 1883 sought to save some of the character of McIntyre's design, even to the extent of re-using the second floor pilasters by McIntyre to frame the new two story bays that pushed out from the entrance front.  Although respectful by the standards of the time, in fact McIntyre's elegant composition was irrevocably altered and subsumed by the new house.  Inside, mantels were replaced, high wainscots installed, yet the Bow Parlor and the Ballroom both survived untouched, as artifacts of the family's past splendors.

The rejected proposal for renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Hartwell & Richardson's accepted design for the renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Interior details in the 'Colonial' style for the new staircase and parlor (American Architect & Building News)

Mr. Lyman writes to American Architect explaining his desire to preserve as much as possible of the old house

 Which brings us back to the photographs that my thoughtful friend supplied.   She thought I might recognize them (I'm a bit of an idiot savant at recognizing buildings from minimal evidence---emphasis on the idiot part), and indeed I did.   They are 21 views of the interior of 'The Vale' after the Hartwell and Richardson remodeling of 1883.  In the rooms can be seen a mix of 18th and 19th century furnishings accumulated by several generations before a 1930's 'restoration' that sought to do away with many of the Victorian 'colonial' flourishes of before.   Like their ancestor before them, that generation of Lymans preserved the Victorian parlor, with its oak woodwork and fire surround of deMorgan tiles.  Today 'The Vale' is owned by Historic New England.

Please click on pictures to enlarge

The Bow Parlor.  The French style furniture suite is original to the house

Two views of the new family living room in the location of the old kitchen.  The tiles surrounding the fireplace are by William deMorgan

The ballroom looking toward the cross hall

The cross hall looking from the new staircase toward the ballroom

The second floor landing

The Drawing Room.  Two of the White Hepplewhite chairs can be seen

The cross hall toward family living room

Dressing room, opening to entrance portico roof

Two rooms in the nursery suite.  Ever thrifty, the Lymans retained the 1850's ingrain carpeting.

The bedroom above the Bow Parlor

Two views of the master bedroom.

A present day view of the master bedroom, after being stripped of its Victorian decorations in the early 20th century (photo uncredited from Historic New England Website.

Present day view of the garden front.  The central bay of the Bow Parlor remains as McIntyre designed it.

 FURTHER READING:

Before we end today's lesson, it is worth noting that Arthur Lyman's sister, Lydia,  married Robert Treat Paine, a housing reformer descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. They lived across the street, on property given them by her father.  When they remodeled the existing house on that property, they hired the other Richardson, H.H. himself, as their architect, and their naturally landscaped grounds were a collaboration with Frederick Law Olmstead.  For that house, click HERE

For previous Dilettante posts about lost Federal country estates in the Boston area, please click HERE,  HERE, and HERE.

For more about The Vale, click HERE for  the Historic New England website